My ADHD and shyness seems to mimic autism

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forget the diagnostic descriptions of how you appear to others.

What is actually going through your mind when you appear "inattentive"?

Jason.

Are you a 60's Batman fan?

That one eggsexample here of a normalcy window is all of it. That was my thought in above post.

I asked my Doc. about my suspicions and He said NO. "The quality of our two way conversation doesn't have any earmarks of Asperger's Syndrome."

That's pretty meaningless. Many aspies can hold down a conversation quite well with a single person, particularly when there is structure or purpose. The real test is continuing to engage with two or more people.

Jason.

We were talking about the antics of someone we knew in regards to their working sphere . There were real time jokes and humor, and two way communicating with the eyes. I felt I was getting all of it quickly and was relaxed and it was fun. He had fun. It was essentially gossip.

Asperger's ? ^

Can you maintain the same level of social interaction in a group?

Jason

My mind will fixate on a thought while listening to someone, go off on a tangent, and miss out on everything someone said. I seem to be more preoccupied with things in my head than the outside world.

It's called hyper focusing.

Last edited by DreamyRocky on 27 Mar 2012, 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Having a one-on-one conversation does not mean that the autistic person has the same subconscious social cognition going on in her head as the NT person does. When talking about a topic, she is mostly thinking about the topic, and most of her statements and eggspressions are unrelated to what the other person is thinking or what the other person is thinking about her or what she is thinking about the other person or what they are thinking about some other people or other thoughts that fall into the category of social cognition. Lacking most of the automatic and complicated social cognition of NTs, the autistic person is going to miss a lot of thoughts communicated by the other person, even in one-on-one situations. A lot of jokes are funny only if you understand the social meanings behind them, so the autistic person is going to miss a lot of socially-oriented jokes.

If the autistic person took on the big project of obsessively learning social cognition and applying it consciously in real-time, then she could eventually reach a high level of application and appear smooth in social interactions. Without ADHD, she would not have problems with inattentiveness or distractibility, and she could focus on applying her learned social cognition one-on-one or in a group, with her application limited by how fast her brain can go while applying any theory. It would have to go very fast to keep up with NTs with subconscious social cognition, but she would not be limited by inattentiveness or distractibility or other factors associated with ADHD-PI.

Last edited by btbnnyr on 27 Mar 2012, 3:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've no idea what you are trying to say, I'm sure that no doctor regardless of skill can assess whatever your point is, on the basis of a conversation alone.

Jason

With people I'm familiar with, family or friends.

I tend to get anxious in unfamiliar surroundings and then this chokes my cognition a bit and I can miss stuff -- very nervous.

Or I go through periods where I miss a bunch whether it's social or not. Cant read, watch TV. etc. It all comes in one lump -- either or.

Hyper focusing usually refers to the ability to stick at something that interests you or has your actual attention. In aspie terms this is usually referred to as a "special interest".

Getting stuck in your head is something reported a lot by aspies. See: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt191694.html.

Jason

This lack of social cognition is easy to observe on the outside, because it leaks out through your behaviors. The psychs can just test you to see if you pick up on any unspoken social meanings, or if you take things literally and fail to see the social meanings that are there, or if you make the standard and to them obvious social interpretations of things that happened in your life or from various scenarios, like what it means when a guy compliments me on my looks and touches my hair or what it means when someone comes to me and says certain things that indicate that they want emotional comfort from me but I didn't know that was what they wanted so I didn't give that to them. If someone is autistic and has not learned a lot of NT social cognition and is not able to apply that knowledge in real-time, then their social behaviors will differ a lot from those of NTs even in a one-on-one conversation. Inattentiveness is not the problem. Lack of or reduced social cognition is the problem. I can only describe it as I don't think that way I don't think that way I don't think that way at all evar.

Here is a good eggsplanation from a person on YouTube: The Way I Communicate

An autistic adult who is able to have a one-on-one or group conversation could have been an autistic child who had no communication, speech or non-verbal, during grade school. I don't think that this severe lack of communication is common in ADHD-PI, and it makes no sense to me to equate autism or Asperger's and ADHD-PI. An autistic child can see and hear eberrything and be attentive to the people and the scene, but the idear of communication may still not occur to her, so she may not respond to her own name or answer a question, even though she missed none of the incomings through her senses, and she is not thinking about anything else either. The incomings are just not understood as prompts for communication in her mind, and she lacks the instinct for communication that NT children have. The more obvious other problem in communication is lack of ability to communicate through speaking or gesturing.

I go through periods of feeling like a horses rear to think I had Autism. It took me over 1400 posts to reach the ADHD conclusion.

Missing the memo again, and not realizing that the Main problem here is in communication , but rather thinking it all lied in a lack of interest and Hyper Focus/Perservation interests that displaced or slowed theory of Mind.

This.
I experience it still (mid-thirty) and for people I know very well, I have this additional thought, that I have to join. So I can catch up some phrase where I feel I can "join" communication and I prepare a phrase in my head and wait for the next opportunitie I can say it. In the meanwhile my whole focus goes to this one phrase I have prepared in my head. I need to say it excactly the way I prepared it.

Actually, I think this sounds just like autism, not just ADHD and SA. Also, I think technically that while Autism is not to be diagnosed if the behaviors are explained by OCD or Schizophrenia, ADHD is not an explanation for autistic symptoms, though then again ADHD can't be diagnosed if someone has a PDD, but it is still done all the time.

Never diagnosed but the more I read, and the more I know about myself, I think that I have AD(H)D. I was painfully shy as a child and would verge on tears if someone so much as looked at me. While I had/have some of the issues that my son faces, I have never had any issue with reading social situations, quite the contrary actually, I am quite apt at reading people's face expressions and body language, often I will notice things that other people have missed. This seems to be the biggest difference between my son and I.

The beauty of brain working like a champ

While it's perceived by most as disability.

What can one do, but laugh. Or maybe educate. There ain't to many who are willing to understand. Trying to explain such a thing often result in,, yea you know.

I wonder though. Could you not say any person could be in that mental state/condition? Surely one frequently see people staring into nothingness for up to minutes and you have to bump the person as yelling the name give no reaction. An autistic would have the same mental state, only far more intensive. Some people may choose to call it meditation. What I am trying to figure, is if we all have the very same capabilities. Some are just more... capable. And some are.. to capable..

Nature seemed balanced before we started to analyze it.